Constance Miles wrote her diary as a series of journals, eleven in all, each of which covered three or four months of the thirty-seven for which she kept a record. She had her own typewriter but, no doubt for the sake of speed, she wrote mostly in longhand, sending each journal out to be typed up in the village and later bound. Her handwriting was not easy to read, and the original typescript includes a number of mistranscriptions which she subsequently crossed through and amended in pen. Some she misssed: her friend Bey Hyde, for example, is spelled ‘Bay’ throughout at least one of the later journals, and Eudo Andrews appears several times as Endo. The niece of old Mr Stevens is sometimes called Miss Stevens and sometimes Miss Scott. These, together with a couple of geographical errors and some muddled dates, have been corrected for this edition rather than reproduced verbatim.
For much of the diary she referred to people by their initials. Thus her friends Bey and Barbara and her son Basil all appear at various times as ‘B’, and ‘Mrs R’ can be either Mrs Rapson or Mrs Rayne. As a general rule, where the person is known from the context I have named them in full to avoid confusion; or their identity, if less certain, has been suggested in footnotes. In some cases, however, it has not been possible to establish who the intial stands for.
Forty pages of the original diary are missing, and what happened to them is not known. The typed pages are numbered in pencil, and page 535, which concludes the entry for 18 May 1940, belongs to the journal labelled by Connie ‘3A: 3 March – 20 May 1940’, while page 536 continues with the entry for 1 July and is marked, in type, in the top right-hand corner ‘B41’. We know that at one point she sent the journals to her stepmother in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, for safekeeping: it may be that these particular pages were lost in transit.
The full diary runs to more than 1,800 pages of typescript and falls not far short of half a million words, which meant that far more material had to be cut than could possibly be included in this book. Much of what Connie recorded, however, consisted of newspaper articles or extracts from other accounts published during the course of the war. For copyright as well as editorial reasons it was a straightforward decision to exclude most of these and concentrate on her own words and impressions, allowing her wonderful and distinctive voice to shine through.
However much we know about the Second World War, there is no substitute for reading about it in the words of those who lived through it. I live not far from Connie’s home village and know the district she writes about well, yet I Iearned a great deal from her diaries that was new to me, not only about the war on her Surrey doorstep but in its wider context.
I am immensely grateful to Mary Wetherell, daughter of Connie’s younger son Basil, for access to her family photographs and to some of her family papers, including a memoir by Connie’s sister Mildred of her mother (Connie’s stepmother) and another about Mildred herself, along with some of Basil’s own wartime correspondence. Most helpful of all were the family memoirs that Connie wrote for her sons, which provided invaluable insight into her husband, Elystan (Robin) and into the Miles family, whose history is less in the public domain than that of Connie’s father William Robertson Nicoll, but is no less interesting.
Spending several months in Connie’s company through her diary, it is impossible not to feel that I have got to know her. I only wish I could have met her, in order to have got to know this amazing woman better.